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1.27.2011

Obsessed with the color of smoke and the color of blood.

My dog got injured last week. It was Martin Luther King Day. Not going to go into the hows and whys. And he's fine, and I'm fine, and we're all fine, all 11 of us not counting the chickens, which would make 22 of us, not counting the pigeons, which would make 154 or so of us, depending on what babies have hatched and are now swaddled under the down of pigeon parents.

So maybe it's the color of pigeons, or the average color of pigeons, and the color of blood. My dog, Slam, the black one, got a rip in his leg that was a bona fide rip. No more details for the squeamish out there, and I guess for me, because I keep seeing that sight: the red state within the black fur, really. It was shaped like the state of ohio. I did not take a picture. But I am living with a whole slideshow, can't erase it. And thus, somehow, am obsessed on a kind of neuronical level with the colors red and black and gray and silver and red. And dark red.

In the book right now, there are mechanations on the main gal's part of clean up the cabin. The bathroom towels are to be cleaned, only the wolf steals them while she's got her back turned. The wolf being the house wolf, whose name is Hamish, after the ham sandwiches he preferred, at first, to anything else. Ham is a kind of pinkish reddish color and this wolf is an ashy to fog color of grey and silver. And the towels, I have written, are salmon pink. I can't get away from it. To get my mind off things and into things I make treasuries, like all the other happy obsessives on etsy (we're a happy, obsessive, global slumber party, aren't we). And lately they are all red and grey. For samplings, keep going.

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book reviews/things said

Joining the ranks of female fiction writers such as Amy Hempel and A.M. Homes, Jana Martin’s first collection of short stories is a force of contemporary nature. (BUSTmagazine)

" Martin's a sweet talker; with prose so forthright and deliberate it's easy to believe you're in the hands of a straight shooter. That's what makes it so surprising, so captivating, when you suddenly realize she's been pulling a fast one on you." (Patrick Rapa, Philadelphia City Paper)

"Knocked my socks off" (Mary Greene, Hudson River Reporter)

"Martin is a writer to watch for" (Dan Wickett, emergingwritersnetwork)

“Prose so luminous it glows like poetry, stories that make you cry" (Tucson Weekly)

"Jana Martin’s sentences have beauty and bite and a rhythm all their own. These are tough, funny stories" (Sam Lipsyte)

"There’s an elegant, flaring strength to Russian Lover, a precision of language that is daring and unique" (Lydia Millet)